I am dreaming that I am walking in a park. Suddenly, spontaneously, I realize that I am dreaming. First thing that comes to me mind is that this is a golden opportunity to find out 'how real' things are in a dream. I decide to walk to a nearby tree to check 'how solid and real' it is by touching it and looking at it close.

However, the closer I am getting to the tree trunk, the more translucent it seems to become, and then the whole dreamscape starts to disappear and boom, I found myself in a completely different dreamscape, having lost lucidity. When I woke up I could remember the whole thing including the following regular non-lucid dream.

LD#2:

I am dreaming that I am in some kind of hospital waiting room. There is a square window through which I can see space (or dark night sky). There is a beam of light coming through the window, a bit like a moon beam, except brighter. I can see the shadows the moonbeam is casting on the wall. As I am looking at the play of light and shadow on the white wall, it occurs to me that this looks 'just like it is real'. This thought kind of jerks me to the realization that I am dreaming!

At that point I remember LD#1 (even though it had happened a year earlier) and start fearing that this lucid dream will also start disappearing. I frantically try to think of a way to keep generating the dream, and decide to focus my attention on the white wall and try to 'keep it there'. Very soon, I can see the wall vibrating, becoming all fuzzy, and then the whole dreamscape collapses just like LD#1 did.

However, this time there is a major difference: I am staying fully lucid and I find myself in a void, being just pure awareness in a dark void, with some pale flashing lights here and there. I desperately try to 'hang in there' because I want to explore more and don't want to wake up, but I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing!

After a few seconds of being in this void, I start feeling my body coming back 'on-line' and gently wake up in my bed, extremely excited but disappointed it was so short.

LD#3:

I wake up at 3:00am in my bed, and can't seem to go back to sleep. After a while, I decide to take this opportunity to do some meditation. As I am meditating in bed, I hear a loud buzzing sound in my head and feel my body vibrate. I decide to go with the flow and surrender to the sensation, having no idea what to expect (I hadn't heard of WILDs back then) and unexpectedly found myself fully lucid in a dreamscape made of snowy mountains. I decide that since focusing on an object collapsed LD#1 and LD#2, maybe it would be better if I kept moving. So I decide to move as fast as I can, kind of as if I am skiing on the snow. After a while of that I find myself actually more like flying around the mountain, about 3 feet above the ground. This feels pretty exhilarating, and I am overjoyed that the dreamscape keeps generating and doesn't collapse.

After a while of that, it occurs to me to try something different: how about trying to meet with a non-physical type of consciousness? (There is a particular one I have in mind.) As soon as I set this intention, I feel a 'change of gear' in my consciousness, kind of like a sensation of acceleration and going up. I find myself in a completely different dreamscape consisting of white noise pixels looking just like a older TV screen with the antenna unplugged: just white noise pixels. I feel very frustrated because I badly want to meet with this being. I try to strain to make sense of this noise, but all I can see is some kind of fuzzy cartoonish moving shape in the center of all the flickering pixels, looking a bit like an automated cartoonish skeleton.

I decide to go back to the previous dreamscape and keep exploring. After a while I decide to try contacting this other consciousness again, and the exact same thing happens: sensation of changing gears, accelerating and going up, then the white noise screen with the fuzzy jerky thing in the center. At that point I have had enough and wake up.

LD#4:

Something wakes me up at 3:00am, so I decide to take this opportunity to see if I can repeat the experience of going from meditation to LD like I did in LD#3. After a while of meditating, I hear the familiar buzzing sound, then the body vibration. This time around, this buzzing/vibration phase lasted a lot longer. After a while, I found myself lucid in a dreamscape. LD#4 lasted a long time and there were several dreamscapes. I did a lot of exploring, and don't remember all of it. I am not sure about the order of things either. Here are the parts I remember:

- I am in some kind of company cafeteria with a dozen people. I am not interacting with them, just walking around. It suddenly occurs to me that one person I am looking at is not human! It has a humanoid-type of body, same height as me, but the facial features are completely different. I notice there are several of them alongside regular human beings, minding their business as usual. It's funny, they somehow are very familiar to me, I am not even surprised to see them.

- Then I find myself looking at a bunch of plants in another dreamscape. I am surprised to see that this time, I can look at those plants very closely, they look hyper-real, hyper-sharp. I am happy to discover that this time, I can inspect every detail very closely yet the dreamscape is not collapsing, unlike it did in LD#1 and LD#2 (interestingly, in all my LDs so far I can remember what I did and what I thought in the previous LDs). I also inspect an old junk pick-up truck half covered in dirt and weeds, and even see cockroaches running around the trunk!

- Then I find myself flying high in the sky looking down at a gorgeous landscape that reminds me of English country, with some older brick buildings (certainly not at all a landscape I would here in Florida). I comment to myself that I sure know how to fly, it's effortless. I go down in the backyard of one old mansion, and see two women walking and discussing something. I can hear what there saying, but I can't remember now what it was.

- At some point I become aware that I am getting very tired and that it might be advisable to wake up. So I wake up in my bed, and at that exact moment, my nine year old son comes in the room complaining of feeling sick. I get up and take him to the kitchen to check his temperature. In the process of doing so, I become aware of some oddities (unfortunately I can't remember what it was) that make me realize that I am still dreaming! LOL! So I again set the intention of waking up and this time I do wake up in my bed! My son is sleeping in his bed and isn't sick, thank goodness!

To help stay in dreams, it is always a good idea to have some kind of dream goal in mind before you have a LD. Standing around in a dream wondering what to do (like what it sounds like you were doing in your void experience) often isnt a good thing and can often cause dream drop outs. (this doesnt mean you have to do the goal you've thought about but its good to have one anyway).

Thanks, yes, that's what I am realizing now... I am making a list of goals, and also strategies on what to try in various situations that might arise in the dream (asking the dream, spinning around, moving fast, etc....). This forum is very helpful for that!

Hey what wonderful dreams..a real journey of natural progression. Thank you so much for sharing. It is such a wonderful journey. Just keep doing what you are doing! I'm sure you'll find yourself exploring all sorts. That last dream is what people have termed as a 'False Awakening'. It's great you realised from that that you were still dreaming. It's a real reminder of what comes first...experience then labels! Ahhh isn't it great to wake up in dream! Tilly

Thanks Tilly! I haven't had any LDs since #4. Next time I wake up at 3:00am, I'll try again. That seems to be the best time for me, all my LDs occurred around that time so far...

I wonder if that has to do with the fact that 3:00am is the peak time for endogenous DMT production by the brain... Because I read the book 'DMT: The Spirit Molecule' by Rick Strassman, where volunteers are injected with DMT in a research setting, and their reported experiences sound similar to WILDs: they report buzzing in their head, colors and shapes, and then immediately find themselves in other realities. So I can't help wonder if WILDs might be facilitated by spontaneous DMT release, because it sounds so similar, at least for me...

One phenomenon I noticed after LD#4, maybe because it lasted so long, is when I woke up and for at least 24 hours after that, it felt as if my brain had been 'fried', as if I had just finished a 10 hour final exam marathon. My brain felt totally exhausted, pressure in my forehead region, etc... I also felt at the edge of a panic attack for a couple days, which is very upsetting for me. I wasn't sure if that was a normal reaction. Maybe WILDs do take a toll on the brain if one isn't used to it? I know some of that is unconscious resistance to the unknown too, but the strange thing is that I got none of that in my first three LDs... In contrary, I was so happy, so excited, and so high after each one, it was awesome.

Anyways, now I am ready for the next one, and I'll just wait for a spontaneous awakening at 3:00am (Unconscious, I hope you are listening to me)!

That book sounds interesting, i must look it up. Yes i mean i have always called it my wolf hour (from Charlie Morley's book) or my witching hour. The one that comes just after the very very spooky time which for me is around 2am...if i wake then i know i am so entwined in deep REM cycle that my whole perspective of the world changes...and I am learning to become comfortable with the discomfort. But for lucid dream entry, certainly to awake just after this time...3 or 4 seems good for most, but we all vary. And I have lucid dreamed much earlier on in the night. But clarity is better for me from 3 on.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as what is normal when we experience long or intense, deep lucidity. Do you use meditation or mindfulness practice? Stretches and breathing before bed. I'm sorry you felt on the edge of panic attacks...could be something to do with a hyper-alert state that the post lucid dreaming mind left you in. So yes, perhaps after lucid dreaming, in the morning, take an hour before the day to stretch, meditate/tai chi/chi gung...anything really that is concerned with grounding and re-stabilizing your energy.

I was lucid dreaming the other morning and kept being awoken by my son who was getting ready for school. He really was, but i really wanted to explore something in my dream. So i just kept re-entering the dream like 4 times...and by the 4th i did get heavy and a strange kind of lethargy came over me in the dream.

I have an alarm now that very gently awakes me, it is the most wonderful sound of water and birdsong and grounding piano chords (smart phone is new to me!) and although i awake naturally, i find this helps me remember my dreams as i have a tendency to just wake up with a jolt when i know i am supposed to. This i feel is good for during the night as well as in the morning as it is also very grounding and is helping me explore the hypnapompic state which is that luscious transition between sleep and wake that i have always missed..again i think good prep for the day after dreaming of any kind, but especially if it has been intense.

Yes I do meditate daily, and I did find some relief from it (though I had heart palpitations the next day while I was meditating, this never happened before, LOL). What also helped was an intense physical workout, more than I usually do.

You're right, it might have to do with rebalancing energies, I didn't think of that... Maybe that's why the workout helped, because it is grounding... Maybe LDs sometimes somehow produce a download of energies from higher levels (I am totally guessing there), so it might be important to ground those energies...

Some of that might make one feel high and hyper-alert the next day, which is great, but too much of it might be blowing a few fuses in my circuits, LOL! I also had a flare up of gastrointestinal issues starting the next day, which is also a red flag for energy imbalances for me, so it is all starting to add up.

I loved reading about your lucid dreams and the progression over time was fabulous! Don't give up if you have a "dry period" because obviously you have some great natural ability to LD and learn and build on the experience. I am having a similar experience: learning and remembering from previous LD while in a dream. Whatever intention I set as I am falling back to sleep is often manifest. Last night I woke from a frightening dream and set the intention to become lucid and be able to respond to anything frightening in a way that transformed it and I was successful!! This is the most phenomenal thing! I don't know why you had the anxiety but my hope for you is that you don't let it stop you (it doesn't sound like it) and I trust it will shift for you. Blessings!Marla

No, I don't think the anxiety will stop me, and I can't wait to continue exploring. I can't think of anything more fascinating than exploring other states of consciousness.

Unfortunately, I have had a series of recent challenges in real life that have required me to take a longer break from LDs than I had planned. So many negative beliefs and emotion have surfaced, I have enough 'exploring' to do in real life these days... I hope this will all settle down soon.

Ah, I so relate. My focus on lucid dreaming has been on again off again over the years for similar reasons. Now things have finally calmed down again so that I can give it priority focus. For me that seems essential to good results. I hope you experience rapid progress with the issues you are working through and can get back soon to diving into the incredible world of lucidity. Maybe even tonight......? We know there are likely answers to whatever is troubling us in the dream world, whether lucid or not. Good luck Karin!